23,000 IP addresses

[mark at amplex.net (Mark Radabaugh)]

On 5/11/11 11:19 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> On May 10, 2011, at 8:30 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:
>
>> On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 8:54 AM, Mark Radabaugh<mark at amplex.net>  wrote:
>>> On 5/10/11 9:07 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
>>> A good reason why every ISP should have a published civil subpoena
>>> compliance fee.
>>> 23,000 * $150 each should only cost them $3.45M to get the information.
>>> Seems like that would take the profit out pretty quickly.
>> +1.
>> But don't the fees actually have to be reasonable?
>> If you say your fee is  $150 per IP address,  I think they might bring
>> it to the judge
>> and claim the ISP is attempting to avoid subpoena compliance by charging an
>> unreasonable fee.
>>
>> They can point to all the competitors charging $40 per IP.
>>
> I am not a lawyer, and you would be a fool to use NANOG for legal advice, but if I were to charge something for this, I would want
> to be able to justify the charge in front of a judge, regardless of what anyone else charges. In other words, something like "we find it typically takes $ 100 to get the backups out of storage, 15 minutes @ $X per minute for a tech to find the right backup disk and 10 minutes at $Y per minute for a network engineer to review the dump."
>
> Regards
> Marshall

Don't forget to include your attorneys time to verify that the subpoena 
is actually legal.  That would add another $100 to the cost at a minimum.

We recently almost released information on a customer in an attempt to 
comply with what appeared to be a valid subpoena.  The subpoena was 
invalid and thankfully our attorney noticed it.   I fully expect the 
bill for the legal advice to be at least $100.00

Really the point though is to charge *some* fee for complying.  It 
doesn't really matter what the fee is.  The reason they sue 10,000 
defendants in one case is to avoid having to pay the $350 (or similar) 
fee to the court for each defendant.   If the ISP's don't charge for 
providing this information a copyright holder can file a civil suit, 
issue subpoena's based on the filing, and intimidate defendants with 
settlement offers before the case gets thrown out of court for 
improperly joining defendants.

http://houstonlawyer.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/over-10000-internet-users-dismissed-from-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-in-a-slight-of-hand-letter-to-the-court/

Add any significant cost to the process of figuring out who the actual 
customers are and the profit motive goes out the window.

-- 
Mark Radabaugh
Amplex

mark at amplex.net  419.837.5015